Graphics slowdown in some games with Creative 3d Blaster 8Mb

anho

New Member

Why do I often experience temporary slowdown in graphics while playing games like Team Apache and Unreal. I have a Creative 3D Blaster 8Mb videoboard running with my Pentium II 350 with 64 Mb RAM. I have consequently installed new drivers as they´ve been released. Is 8Mb not enough for these games or what? Does anybody recognise this problem?

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Chanse

Guest

The problem is not the amount of ram, but the chipset. The graphics blaster is a great card, but was made for entry -level 3d and such, not games. The permedia 2 chipset just can't handle the thoroughput required by these newer games.

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anho

New Member

I forgot to mention that my videoboard is Creatives 3D Blaster VOODOO2 8Mb so gameplay is exactly what it´s made for and I cant understand why it´s slowing down on games like Unreal and Team Apache. Ultimate Race Pro and Incomming looks great and run fast???

C

Chanse

Guest

collinj

New Member

Unreal is optomized for 128 mb of system ram. If you have any less, you will experience some slow downs, and occasional stops and droped frames. Try bumping down your resolution and use lower quality sound. This should help speed things up. Now with team apache, Im not sure... probably the same problem though, it is probably optomized for really high system ram amounts.
If you are running unreal at 800x600, drop the resolution down to 640x480, this should make it playable. I have to run it at 512x384 resolution with my Pure3d voodoo1 card, a pII 266 and 64mb of sdram mem. At 640x480, the frame rates are just too slow, and I have sound cut outs periodically. Try these out firts, but if 800x600 resolution is really important to you, get another 64mb of ram. Or get another 8mb creative voodoo2 card and run sli if yours supports it. (I know diamonds monster 3d 2 8mb cards support sli).

anho

New Member

collinj

New Member

It is not just you Chanse, I ran to the local memory store and got another 32mb of ram when I got unreal, to put my ram to 64. Running unreal with 32mb of ram is horrible! And I dont even have a really slow computer. My pII 266 with a canopus pure3d card and 32mb of ram sped through every 3d game I played up until unreal. Unreal is just a plain memory hog. Just goto the unreal folder on your hard drive, and look up the texture files. Alot of the files are large. Next time you run unreal, look at the log and pay attention to the texture files that are loaded. They will go up near 64mb of memory, just for these files. Now think, if the game is using 64mb of system memory for textures, where will the game engine get loaded? Where does the program execute?? So, if you have less than 128mb of memory (the recommended amount by epic for the best game play), alot of the texture files have to be cached on the hard drive, and we all know how slow they are compared to ram.